Corporate Responsibility: Need or Fad? by Sabrina Chong Yee Ching

Business plays many roles. Besides producing goods and services to satisfy the needs of the society, it has the important roles of creating and distributing wealth to its owners or shareholders, paying wages and salaries to its employees, making purchases from its suppliers, paying taxes to society and making other payments to the government, and carrying out philanthropic activities. However, in the process of playing the positive roles, business has also created a negative role for itself in the sense that it often generates harmful environmental and social impacts, such as waste and pollution, unfair labor practices, failure to respect human rights in its activities, irresponsibly producing products that contain harmful substances and carrying out unethical practices that negatively affect customers and society.